Again, it is something that has been happening
at Phoronix going back to 2005. This year was a fairly normal year for NVIDIA
and their Unix graphics driver team. There really were not any breakthroughs,
but they continue to be at a near-parity with their Windows driver in terms of
features and performance. The code-base is largely shared between their Linux/Solaris/BSD/Windows
graphics drivers, but the non-Windows drivers are currently lacking when it comes
to GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" overclocking support and a few other items.
NVIDIA continues to provide Linux support for new graphics cards at launch in
their binary driver, but they still provide no form of open-source support.

The drivers being tested for this 2011 year-end recap are all
of their major binary Linux graphics drivers going back to the end of 2010. Unlike
AMD, NVIDIA does offer up beta graphics drivers, but those ones were not tested
in this article since they are close to the same numbers as the official releases.
Before getting to the OpenGL performance results, here is a few words about some
of the driver versions released this calendar year.

270.18:
The NVIDIA driver now zeroes out memory by default when allocating system memory.
For this driver and throughout 2011, NVIDIA Linux developers continued providing
prompt support for new X.Org and Linux kernel releases -- an area where AMD's
Linux developers have generally lagged greatly behind. This driver also shipped
with a new library, NVML, for "programmatic access to static information
and monitoring data for NVIDIA GPUs."

270.41.06:
Lots of new graphics support in the GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" hardware
series, support for new GLX protocol extensions, and various bug-fixes. Common
to most of the NVIDIA Linux driver releases this year was work on the 3D Vision
support and continued maintenance on their VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation
API for Unix) video acceleration support.